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ENGLISH 48N:The American Songbook and Love Poetry (AMSTUD 48N)

A study of performances (Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra etc) of songs by classic American composers (Porter, Rogers and Hart, Cohen).

Last offered: Winter 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE

ENGLISH 51N:The Sisters: Poetry & Painting (ARTHIST 160N)

Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.

Last offered: Winter 2018
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 60N:Living on the Edge: Language and Landscape of the Western Fringes

What does it feel like to live on the edge, facing an expanse between you and the next place? Who has lived on the Western fringes of Britain and America? Who has named, formed, and been inspired by that land? Whose voices are silenced in the (re)making of a place? Shaping the landscape through the words we use or the features we build is as old as recorded time and, in this seminar, we'll investigate how the land is imagined, defined, settled, and delimited throughout history, with particular reference to western Britain and California. We'll focus on specific elements in the landscape Water, Hill, Tree, Stone, and Border looking at a sequence of locations through historical, archaeological, placename, literary, and artistic analyses. Students will produce place-name studies; the depictions of landscape through creative work (poetry, prose, non-fiction, song, or picture) on three fieldtrips; and close readings of literary descriptions of landscape. Among the authors study will be John Muir, John Steinbeck, Edward Thomas, Linda Noel, Dylan Thomas, and Gwyneth Lewis.

Last offered: Spring 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 68N:Mark Twain and American Culture (AMSTUD 68N)

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society's (and our society's) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, and what it means to be "American"?

ENGLISH 72N:Serial Storytelling

"TV's Lost Weekends," a recent headline says, referring to the modern habit of binge-watching television shows. Such news stories debate the right way to watch TV. They also echo longstanding arguments about how to read books. This course juxtaposes contemporary television with classic serial novels in order to explore different ways of experiencing longform narratives. How do we read or watch when we're forced to wait before the next episode---or, conversely, given the opportunity to binge?

Last offered: Winter 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 75N:American Short Stories (AMSTUD 75N)

How and why did the short story take root and flourish in an American context? Early works of classic American literature read alongside stories by women and minority writers, stretching from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary period.

Last offered: Autumn 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 76:After the Apocalypse

What happens after the world, as we know it, has ended? In the course of examining classic and newer speculative fictional narratives detailing the ravages of various post-apocalyptic societies and the challenges those societies pose to the survivors, we explore several related questions: What is an apocalypse? What resources does speculative fiction offer for understanding and responding to oppressive societies? Where does the idea of the apocalypse originate? Is an apocalypse always in the future? Or has it already occurred? For whom might apocalypse constitute an ongoing present? In this course, we use the tools of close reading and historical criticism to build an archive of knowledge about the narrative, visual, and aural features of apocalypse. Students will be guided through the creation of a multimedia portfolio over the course of the quarter, for presentation at the end. No written midterm or final exam.

Last offered: Spring 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

ENGLISH 79N:The Renaissance: Culture as Conflict

Focus is on the Renaissance not as a cultural rebirth but as a scene of cultural conflict. Course materials are selected from Renaissance art, history, philosophy, politics, religion, and travel writing; authors include More, Luther, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Shakespeare. Among the conflicts we will explore are: old (world)/new (world), wealth/poverty, individual/collectivity, manuscript/print, religion/secularism, Catholicism/Protestantism, monarchism/republicanism, femininity/masculinity, heterosexuality/homosexuality.

This course asks about the "meaning of life" in our time, the 21st century, and over the past 200 years. It proposes that some classic reasons for living, and modes of giving value to life, ethics, religion, family are no longer particularly active; while new, poorly articulated and ill-acknowledged systems of life-evaluation rule our senses of meaning. In particular, the course will discover, try to systematize, and then test a few of these covert modern life philosophies: aestheticism; perfectionism; ecstasy. Representatives of more classic systems of meaning Christian experience, and Aristotelian ethics will offer comparative cases. Students will be challenged to articulate and evaluate their own reasons for living and anticipated meanings of life, and to become skillful interpreters of both art and ideas in texts, learning methods from literature, philosophy, and history. They should also develop richer and more precise understandings of those contested terms, modern and modernity. Readings may include Wordsworth, Thoreau, Flaubert, Aristotle, Thomas à Kempis, Theresa of Avila, Whitman, Dickinson, Sontag, plus contemporary sources.

What, if anything, does reading literature do for our lives? What can literature offer that other forms of writing cannot? Can fictions teach us anything? Can they make people more moral? Why do we take pleasure in tragic stories? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It addresses key questions about the value of literature, philosophical puzzles about the nature of fiction and literary language, and ways that philosophy and literature interact. Readings span literature, film, and philosophical theories of art. Authors may include Sophocles, Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Proust, Woolf, Walton, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Students master close reading techniques and philosophical analysis, and write papers combining the two. This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.